When do we disregard IE5 and IE5.5?

[EOBeav]

Hi everybody. I installed a WordPress blog today, and found a really nice layout to go with it. I was able to personalize it just by minimally tweaking the stylesheet. For a quick job, I'm happy with it.

My issue is that, when I checked it out in browsershots.org, I found that it holds together in everything but IE5 and IE5.5, where it falls apart pretty badly. Is it time to finally say "screw it" to those two browsers, and just design for IE6 and above (along with the FF, Safari, etc...)? Or is it still important to make a consideration for them?

Thanks in advance for your responses.

[JPnyc]

That's pretty much an individual decision. We don't test in them anymore, if that helps at all. Then again I see people using old scripts on here still testing for IE3 and 4 and NS 4.

[drhowarddrfine]

Yeah, what a waste. Forget IE<6 and NS4.

[felgall]

If you have any sort of stats program available in your hosting then you should be able to see what percentage of your visitors are using which browsers. Once visitors using a particular browser drop below a certain percentage that you choose (say 0.5%) then you would drop support for it. If most of your visitors are using IE5 even though the same is not true of other sites then they are the ones you'd need to cater for.

I still have enough Netscape 4 users visit my site for me to want to make sure it is readable but it looks totally different in that browser than in the others.

You have to support more than just the latest browsers with the way you code your page as most people are still using antiquated versions of Internet Explorer (I would consider any browser that is more than 5 years behind the current standards to be antiquated eg IE8).